Fat Buddha Said Play Hooky

What he really said was, "Screw you guys," but I interpreted that to mean, "Stay home, take a break, and don't bother with the rest of the world. At least for today."

So I will not shave, though I will probably take a shower, and I will sleep in, and when I do bother to get up, I will not change out of my scrubby clothing, and I will feed the kids Hostess donuts for breakfast. The kids will veg out on video games and T.V. all day, and I will not miss the looks and cold shoulders from the moms and grandparents of the world (the grandmas are the worst, it's like I'm going to eat their grandkids).

Except I will do the dishes. That needs to get done, and I think Fat Buddha can let me at least do that. I also will feed the kids, though I'll let the five year old stand in front of the refrigerator and let out all the cold air. To hell with it! Take five minutes to figure out what you want! Yes, I am cooling down the whole world!

So my kid is not going to school today. He's playing Wolverine, and the two year old is singing and eating a chocolate donut. We are all a mess, and Monday will be our day of rest.

Fat Buddha said so.

Comic #25

A Kind of Immortality

I get haunted by ghosts all the time.

Now before you call Ghost Hunters, I'm talking about the abstract kind. These are the empty husks of memories that follow me around and punch me in the gut when I'm doing something else. I'll be minding my own business, driving to breakfast while listening to my wife and kids, and I'll see a soccer field, and all of a sudden I'm possessed, and apparitions from when I was a scrawny kid with acne will bombard me. I'll be back in time when I was a wallflower, and I'd avoid the ball, until the coach told me to get more aggressive. With sweaty phantoms of blue and yellow all around me, I will growl, just like I did on that grass. I will be angry. I will be an animal, and I will kick that goddamn spiritual soccer ball in that goddamn ethereal goal.

Until with a jolt, I must stop the car, just like how the referee said, "Hey kid, you can't growl, that's a warning. You do it again I'll kick you off the field." I am no longer bewitched, and the ghosts have faded.

Though I can still feel them, as they swarm beneath the surface, and all of the people I've known, who are dead and gone to me now, who are just figments of my imagination, will continue to live on through me. Perhaps there is not a heaven. Perhaps there is not a hell. Perhaps there is no where we truly go when we die, and everything we've ever done will mean nothing in the far distant future.

For now, however, those who have passed on from my life exist in me, and one day, when my physical form is gone, just as I have been haunted, perhaps others will be haunted by me.

Comic #24

A Different Sort of Penis

The wife went to a "Future of Social Gaming" seminar, to which I replied, "Tell the geniuses at the social gaming thing to make people suck less."

I was half serious, and as she always does, she ignores me when I'm being...being, well like me. Then last night, I'm playing League of Legends, which is a free-to-play competitive PvP game, and the dicks arrived. They started using the N-word, and dropping F-bombs, which is shorthand for, I'm a dick, and I'm going to let you know I'm a dick, and there is nothing you can do about my dickishness.

Then they started "feeding" which is a type of griefing in which a player lets the opposing team kill them over and over again, which in turn makes the opposing team more powerful because kills give experience and gold. So not only are the dicks being dicks with words, their actions are dicky as well.

So the half-serious quip becomes truth.

Now, to be fair to LoL, they have a reporting system (which is ineffective due to the number of complaints vs. the number of employees at their company), and they are implementing a democracy of sorts called the Tribunal System, where we the players may judge other players. Hopefully all of that works out. Perhaps heads will roll, and Viva La LoL! will save us from the dicks, but honestly, that is just sweeping the dicks to another place, somewhere else where they can continue to be dicks to other people (hopefully each other).

My observation about most attempts to corral the dicks away from "normal people" is that they tend to treat the symptoms. Yes, suspensions and bans work, about as well as prison does, which means it's too little too late. As proposed by Penny Arcade in this comic, what gives the dicks their power is the anonymous nature of social gaming. I mean, think about it, how can something be social if the people in question have no idea who they are being social with? Wouldn't that be called "anonymous gaming" or perhaps "gaming with strangers?"

Though the quick fix of attaching your real life information to your game avatar has serious issues, as evidenced by the World of Warcraft Real ID fiasco. So on one hand, we have anonymous dicks, and on the other, we have dicks IRL.

So I'll rehash here what I told my wife (seriously this time), because the entire future of social gaming depends on it--

Hey Geniuses: Fix the Dick Problem.

Contentment Defined

Happiness <---> Unhappiness

As I alluded to in my last post on the subject, the above sliding scale is wrong. By this I mean, ineffective, counterproductive, and unlikely to make anyone anything other than ticking time bombs of self-destruction. For if you are not happy, then you must be unhappy, and since there are so few moments in your life when you are happy, then you must be unhappy the rest of the time.

Remember, I'm using these definitions:

Happiness = Pleasure + Triumph
Unhappiness = Pain + Grief

My prediction for everyone on the planet (and if I can't make that assumption, which is a fair objection, then I can at least make it for myself) is that there are relatively a few moments in our day to day lives where we are feeling true pleasure or triumph. So if you aren't happy, then by all accounts, if you only use the happiness/unhappiness scale, then you must be unhappy. You might not feel it, you might be doing your daily routines, wondering what is wrong with your life, your job, your kids, your hobbies, yourself: why you don't feel happy, and if that means you really are unhappy, underneath it all.

I propose that your life is not wrong, and that you are just fine, because your spectrum should look like this:

Happiness <---> CONTENTMENT <---> Unhappiness

I have put the middle term in all caps, because 90% of your life is smack dab in the middle. You are only up in the clouds 5% of the time, and you are only down in the dirt 5% of the time. The rest of your life is in that middle ground, where everything tastes like water, where you aren't too hot, aren't too cold, where you might not get what you want, but you might just get what you need.

Once you reorient yourself, once you stop seeking out the fleeting wisps of happiness, or rolling with the hard knocks, then you can perceive that who you are, no matter what you do, is an invisible path. Your life is the intangible middle ground. You will not remember it tomorrow, and you will not notice it all around you, until you stop, and pay attention to your contentment.

What is contentment? Well, let's define it further:

Physical Contentment = Flow

What is this? Flow? That sounds dumb. And yet, when an athlete is acting and reacting, without thought of failure, when they move like water, when they flow, then they are truly content. They are in the zone. When you are brushing your teeth, or vacuuming your carpet, or cleaning your toilet, or driving, or eating, or watching your kids play, or whatever concrete action you are doing when your life is moving on and on and on into the future, you are flowing with it and around it and through it, without thought, with and without effort, and you are water. Your life is mostly flow. It goes on, and you only notice the rapids and rocks in the river, while you ignore the river itself.

Abstract Contentment = Meditation

Huh? So we are all monks now? Do we have to sit cross-legged and chant "oooom?" If it helps you, sure, but I'm talking more the general use of the term, where your brain is occupied, but neither filled with triumph or grief. This is the place where daydreams go, or where you might think about the task at hand, or you might not be thinking at all. Your brain might be in idle, or it might be supercharged, working on your doctorate thesis. The key thing to notice here, is that we are talking about your day to day thoughts, combined with where your brain is when it is not thinking at all.

So where do we go from here? Now that we have a framework for contentment, we can notice it, and strive for it. We do not need to buy that car, or fuck that person, or wallow in our misery. Our goals can be a sustainable self, with contentment as our goal, and while the ups and downs of happiness and unhappiness might frame our lives, we are secure in the knowledge that we are content, and that everything is just fine after all.

Six Things I Hate About Your Movie

1) Awkward Moments. There are times in my life where I have not been stellar. Memories I'd rather forget, and yet, your movie has some idiot saying or doing something that makes me embarrassed for them, which in turn churns up nausea-inducing flashbacks to high school/crowds/parties/girls/hazing. Trust me, you don't want me feeling queasy about your movie.

So stop it with the awkward speech, awkward confession, awkward meet-up, awkward sex, awkward-whatever-is-in-your-twisted-past-that-you-thought-looked-super-on-film.

2) Groups of Friends that Don't Look Like Friends. "Hey, we are all friends! We sit around and drink at nondescript bars and don't have real conversations, and we have nothing in common whatsoever! Let's move on to the plot!"

I hate your characters if they are comprised of six stereotypes that shouldn't belong. A protagonist, a stud, a geek, a slut, a wallflower, and a prude do not mystically group up for no reason. Give them a common purpose for being together. Pick something, anything. Make them all like kayaking, I don't give a shit. Just please don't make it any easier for me to not give a damn about your characters.

3) Invincible Normal People. If a non-superhero gets shot, punched, kicked in the face, thrown off a building, flung out of a moving vehicle, or whatever idiotic thing you think looks cool, please have them react accordingly. I've watched enough Mythbusters to know that Buster the crash test dummy is royally fucked over by one quarter the damage done to movie characters.

Yet, in Transformers 2, three normal humans in a car are dropped from the sky, a fall of about ten stories, and they are perfectly fine because of the airbags (even the dude in the backseat!) In Iron Man, Tony Stark gets flung about 100 yards in the desert, and he's fine because he's inside a steel suit he made in a cave. Sure.

So please, if your protagonist must be punched in the jaw, please break it, and have them be in agony for the next couple weeks. Your script will be greater because of it, I promise.

4) People Meeting Each Other. "Hi. Hi. I'm Jub Jub Binky. I'm Goo Goo Montana. I like peanuts. So do I. Do you like penguins? No. Me neither. Okay. Okay. Let's have a scene with conflict now. Sure, let's do that."

Cut out the beginning of every scene where people are meeting each other for the first time. I'm a smart dude. I can fill in the blanks. If you want two people to meet, do this: a) show the two people for 3 seconds. b) cut to them having a conflict. We can figure out that they met and did stuff before that point, and will be grateful that we didn't have to watch the tedious parts. Give us conflict now, not later, because by the time it gets to later, we will be too bored to care about your dumbass characters.

5) People Drinking/Eating. I realize that your actors are not talented enough to hold the audience's attention without a prop, so I understand your need to fill their hands with generic alcoholic drinks. However, might I suggest that you give these actions some characterization? Boring choices make your characters (guess what?) boring.

At the beginning of Chaos Theory, the so-called random Mom (who is pissed off that her husband is so bland), makes waffles, sausage and bacon. What, you thought I wouldn't notice? Movies are for watching, derp! Random Mom should serve leftover Chinese food and Pop Tarts for breakfast. Those would be memorable choices, and give the characters something to react to and argue over. Bing! Conflict!

Now I'm not saying every meal has to be filled with random crap. Just please please please please fit the choices on screen to who the characters are. Random Mom would not have a clean counter either, or a bowl filled with glorious fruit. She'd have clutter everywhere, and the sink would be filled with dirty dishes. Random Mom is a mess, so show her that way. We notice, and so should you.

6) Horrible Extras. In Hellboy 2, there is a scene in an underground troll market, with lots of despicable faerie creatures running around. Or actually it isn't, since there are only a couple of CGI monsters, while the rest of the crowd is made up of extras in robes with bags on their heads. We could have had a super cool backdrop, instead, what we got was Hellboy walking around a bunch of people with shitty costumes.

I get why you are doing this. If you make your extras look marvelous, then there is the chance that they might upstage your main characters, and we'll pay more attention to the background than the foreground. However, that just means your main characters are boring. Make everything exciting, and we'll be excited about your movie. Your movie is only as good as the weakest link, and if your weakest link sucks, then your movie sucks. Funny how that works.